Chapter 12: The Kitchen Table

We put my mother to bed in Maude's spare room at nine o'clock, under a quilt with ducks on it.

She was asleep before Maude finished telling her what was in the closet.

"Go," Maude said to us, waving her cane toward the door. "I'll sit. I like to watch someone sleep who isn't dead."

"Gram."

"Go on. You look like two people who've won something."

It was ten past ten when Ewan parked the van on Hird Avenue, two doors down, with the lights off.

The house was dark.

Dale's Lincoln was gone from the drive, and the window blinds were drawn.

"He went to the Parma Elks," I said. "Where he goes when he's been humiliated and wants someone to agree with him."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

I took a key out of my bra.

It was a small brass key on a loop of fishing line.

My father had given it to me when I was seventeen.

Dale had changed the front lock, but he'd never thought about the padlock on the garage.

"Come on," I said.

The side door opened with a creak I could have drawn from memory.

The workshop smelled the way it always had, sawdust and WD-40 and old metal.

I pulled the chain on the single bulb.

My father's workbench ran along the back wall, long and scarred and as high as my hip, with a vise bolted to one end.

His pegboard hung above it, with the outlines of his tools drawn in black marker.

Every hammer, every wrench, in its own ghost.

I stood in the middle of the floor, and the tears came without asking.

"Rosie."

"I'm fine."

"You're not. Come here."

He wrapped his arms around me, and I put my face into his chest.

I cried for a minute, for my father and the house and my mother's lipstick.

He just held me, one hand on the back of my head.

"I got her out," I said into his shirt.

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